By now, you probably know all about the benefits of including a blog as part of your business’s online presence. By the far the easiest way to publish a regular stream of fresh, new content to your website, hosting a blog can bring in big rewards when it comes to increasing your website traffic and converting those casual visitors into repeat customers
Yet aren’t blogs complicated, tricky things to setup and configure? Maybe once upon a time, yes, but those days are thankfully all long gone.
With one-click installation services now a common feature of many leading web hosting plans, implementing a blog as part of your web presence is often no more difficult than hitting a button.
Just signed up to a hosting plan and torn between all the different blogging platforms at your disposal? Here’s our guide to the best of the best.
WordPress
We couldn’t really start an article about blogging platforms without at least mentioning WordPress.
The world leader in open source blogging and content management solutions, WordPress is supported by all of the best web hosting companies and is used by scores of businesses and popular sites not only as a blog, but as the backbone of their entire online operation.
With thousands of themes and yet more extensions and plugins, there isn’t much you can’t do with WordPress, making it our top choice for an awesome one-click installation blogging platform.
Moveable Type
Apparently, not all hosting companies provide one-click install for Moveable Type, but if yours does, it’s well worth taking a look at. Whilst WordPress may be the most widely-used blogging solution around, Moveable Type more than holds its own, acting as the backbone for some of the world’s biggest blogging networks like Gawker and Lifehack.
What makes this one so appealing is that you can set up multiple blogs, manage them all from one location and connect them all together to run several sites at the same time.
Serendipity
As good and as powerful as our first two picks may be, they do have some drawbacks, namely in the fact that, if you want to update your plugins, or the software as a whole, you more or less have to do it automatically. Not so with Serendipity, which sets its stall as the blogging platform of choice for new bloggers.
With everything done automatically for you, and with a simple wizard helping you configure your blogs setting, if this is the first time you’ve looked at using a blog, Serendipity is worth checking out.
Lifetype
Much like Moveable Type, Lifetype allows you to run and manage a number of different blogs all from one backend dashboard.
Though it doesn’t do much more to make it stand out from the crowd, it’s on our list simply because, if you find that your hosting provider doesn’t support one-click installation for Moveable Type, they’ll likely support Lifetype, which about as good an alternative as it gets.
BlogEngine.Net
A nice compromise between the big guns like WordPress and the newcomer-friendly platforms like Serendipity, BlogEngine.Net is another free, open-sourced blogging tool. Offering all the simplicity of the latter with most of the functionality of the former, one of the biggest differences here is that you don’t need the usual MySQL database to power the whole thing. Instead, all of your blog entries can be stored through simple XML, though if you do decide that you prefer SQL, that option is still there.
Is there a top blogging platform we haven’t mentioned here? Do you prefer another alternative to tools like WordPress? We’d love to hear your reviews and suggestions. Use the comments below to share your thoughts on your favourite blog.